anthropology

The following are a list of key findings from my research on parental assessment of video game content appropriateness for their children. You can read the first round of published results here.

There were no parents in the study who were able to definitively name all of the parts of the ESRB Ratings System or all six ratings and over two-thirds did not know what process games went through to get rated. This resulted in the majority of interviewed parents knowing little to nothing about the ratings system even if they claimed they used it.

Interviewed parents had very specific criteria they used to judge video game appropriateness against and once any of those lines were crossed, the game was considered unsuitable. Though violence was a concern for interviewed parents, perceptions of violence were far more nuanced than the ESRB Rating System descriptors were able to convey, thus many had to do further research to properly assess the game and make sense of the content. Sexual content, however, was of a far higher concern than violence even for those interviewed parents who considered themselves very liberal in the types of games they allowed their children to play.

Interviewed parents with special needs children considered the needs of their child and the ability for a game to help him or her as more important than staying within content that was age appropriate.

Based on the interviews, every family’s and child’s needs are different, including children within the same family. Therefore, a single information system, such as the ESRB Ratings System, may never be able to completely fulfill all of a parent’s information needs as they attempt to bridge their knowledge gap. As long as it provides a place to start, that may be all it needs to do.

Relevant to the previous finding, interviewed parents attempted to bridge their knowledge gaps in multiple ways in order to assess game content and make sense of it. These included using the ESRB Ratings System, Internet searches (including specific sites as well as more general results) to find game reviews (both community and professional), game marketing (including websites, packaging, and commercials), and Let’s Plays (video game play-throughs).
Credibility of the gaming information source was very important to interviewed parents. They cited both the source of the documentation as well as the reputation of the reporting source to be important factors in establishing credibility.

Though a few interviewed parents were in favor of a law, most were not. Those in favor cited it as an extra level of protection or as something they thought was already in place. Those not in favor cited issues with enforcement, the inability for laws to really assist them, as well as a general dislike of having the government interfere with their role as parents.

Specific answers to research questions will be published in a separate post.

Here are a few stats from my research on parents and video games copied directly from my dissertation. This post will be the first of several where I talk about my ethnography and the results of my study.

Research Participants
There were 46 total participants in 30 interviews representing 26 households. As defined in Chapter One, a household represents parents who participated alone as well as those who participated together (in the same interview or separately). This singular unit was created to avoid inflation of the numbers where two parents were talking about their shared children and home environments, as that would skew the numbers against those where only one parent participated. Of the participants, 11 were children and 35 were parents. The 35 parents represented 39 qualifying children in total including the 11 who contributed. Of the 35 participating parents, 18 were mothers and 17 were fathers. The parents spanned in ages from 25 to 55. The youngest child participant was 4 and the oldest was 16.

This study afforded opportunities for additional analyses, given the rich qualitative data collected throughout the interviews. Each section below provides this additional information as a way to give context to the research participants and better understand their relationship with video games.

Video Games
Over 200 games were mentioned throughout the course of the interviews, not including the various versions of multiple game franchises. The top three most mentioned games were Minecraft (85% of households), followed by Grand Theft Auto (65%), and then World of Warcraft (42%). Almost two-thirds (64%) of the 39 children played M-rated games and over three-quarters (77%) played T-rated games. None of the children in the study were old enough to purchase M-rated games and only 31% of the 39 children were old enough to purchase T-rated games.

Video Game Devices
Participants played console, computer, and mobile/tablet games equally (88%). Handheld games (58%), followed by web-based (38%), and then educational (35%) rounded out the list. Over three quarters of all 26 households (77%) used some sort of cloud gaming services such as Steam, Origin, Xbox Live, or PlayStation Network. All households downloaded games digitally, whereas only about three-quarters (77%) still bought physical game media.

Video Game Spaces
The majority of game spaces (58%) were publicly shared spaces with the family. Very few (8% of all households) had completely private spaces where stationary devices such as computer towers or consoles were located in children’s rooms. The remaining households (35%) had mixed game spaces due to the use of portable electronics such as laptops, handhelds, and mobile/tablet devices. The majority of households (69%) had some sort of time restrictions placed on video game play; however, less than half of them (39%) considered them to be strict rules.

Parental Assessment
An overwhelming majority of the 26 households (92%) performed some sort of assessment on video games before their children were allowed to play them. Almost all of the 26 households (92%) discussed video game content with their children, and most (85%) stated they knew their children to self-regulate and/or they trusted their children to only play the games of which they knew their parents approved.

Parental Involvement
Almost three-quarters of the 26 households (73%) watched their children play video games and many (69%) played video games with their children. Over half (54%) of the 26 households allowed their children access to the Internet to either play online video games such as massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG i.e., World of Warcraft) which can only be played online, or to play standard multiplayer video games with others online.

You can read about the key findings here. Answers to my specific research questions will be in a different post.

It was mentioned to me that I should update this blog to reflect the fact that I have finally finished my PhD! It only took me 6 years or so, but to be fair I also got married, had twins, and moved to Hawaii in the middle of all of that. So overall, not too shabby of a timeline given those variables.

If you’re looking to get a PhD or in the process of attaining one and you’d like to chat or commiserate, feel free to hit me up on Twitter or in the comments here.

If you’re interested in video games and research in that domain, I’ll be posting results of my study for my dissertation in the days to come!

I think one of the things people fail to realize about the possibility of this Apple backdoor is that it not only has implications for us as Americans, but also for people all over the world.

Consider what doing this would mean for people who live their daily lives in danger when the only protection afforded to them or their loved ones may be the fact that their privacy is secure and their data encrypted.

Consider what it may mean for journalists or whistle blowers.

Many people all over the world only access the Internet through mobile devices. It’s all they can afford. They may even make their living doing so. What if that was taken away because it was no longer considered secure?

Consider everything you have done with your devices knowing they are secure and what may change in your life if at some point it no longer was.

It’s World Anthropology Day. I challenge everyone to look around the world a little differently today to see if they can empathize with people who live in situations completely different from their own. I challenge you to consider what your life would be like if your privacy no longer existed and you had to live in fear – this is reality for so many.

I get a few inquiries each semester from students looking for information on how to get into user experience design, especially those with an anthropology background. I generally try to respond to each of these separately as they each have their own perspective and needs, however, this semester I am trying to get my dissertation defended on top of my every day job as a UXD (which is getting more complicated by the minute). So, rather than leave these unanswered, I am providing a public response here that includes the most common things I share. If you have comments or questions, please leave them! It will be easier for me to respond to those here than individual emails and you may help someone else who has a similar inquiry.

Response Below

Thank you for reaching out to me. Let me start out by saying that having a background in anthropology will lend itself greatly to UX design, however, it is only one part. My suggestion is to consider opportunities where you will be asked to learn to program or script (even just HTML/CSS) and have real users use what you create. This is not necessarily where your career path as a UXD will take you, but creating something, having users use it, and then having to “fix” it to make it better for them, will provide you with insight that no degree program will ever do.

After that, I suggest looking into classes in cognitive psychology and information architecture or information behavior. Adding those to your anthropology perspective will help you find out what users want and then understand what they really need – which may be two separate things. 😉

As for internships, consider looking into the agency world. What I mean by that is marketing/creative agencies that do campaigns for other companies. Not that you want to go into marketing, I prefer the high tech/application world myself, but it allows you to see how UX is applied to multiple groups of people and projects in a short amount of time. A lot of times you can find UXD or IA (information architecture) opportunities – both of which would be beneficial to you.

And I suggest taking a look at the UX Slack channel that has UXers from all over the world lending their perspectives to the field (and it may lead to internship opportunities).

I hope that helps!

End Response

There is a lot that could be added to this, however, I feel it is a great place for people to start. I definitely recommend everyone going into user experience design have some sort of programming or scripting background where people have had to use what you create. My biggest failure as a developer led me to becoming a UXD and in my particular field I use skills I learned as a systems administrator/developer all the time. Not that I do those things anymore, but my past experiences and my understanding of those things definitely help inform me how to make those things easier for others to do. And really, that’s the best part of being an anthropologist and a UXD – being able to use your own experiences to inform your designs. That is, after all, what participant observation is all about!

So, my last post was in February, and there is a very good reason for that. That was the month I got my IRB approval for my dissertation research and the same month my husband left for a nine-month tour in Korea. So, here I’ve been working full-time, being a full-time mom and working on my dissertation.

The working title for my information science dissertation so far is Understanding Parental Information Behavior in Assessing Video Game Content for their Children: An Ethnographic Study. I’ll be using ethnographic methods similar to the ones I used for my Masters thesis including both in-person and virtual semi-structured interviews with parents, an online survey, and observing parents shopping for video games. You can learn more about it at ResearchingVideoGames.

I’m currently analyzing my interviews and will be seeking approval IRB approval for my survey as the fall semester begins. If you are a parent of a child who plays video games and is between the ages of 4 and 17, feel free to email me at researchingvideogames [@] gmail in order to be notified when the survey becomes available. As a parent, you don’t have to be a gamer to participate.

Yesterday I found myself introduced to a brand new online community of people. As common as this community is, it’s completely foreign to me from the topics they talk about to the language abbreviations they use. Then I realize here I am again, the n00b.

Though most look down on the rank of n00b, it’s perhaps the most valuable position in a new group. Why? Well, everything is new! You have no preconceptions of how it should be, you question everything, and you are able to provide insights on things that those who’ve been around a while just take for granted. Being a n00b means there are no expectations of you, and really when you’re learning all you can this is exactly where you want to be. People are more willing to forgive mistakes, to answer questions, and to be just overall helpful.

So the next time you’re new, appreciate the fact you’re a n00b. It’s the best place for an anthropologist to be!

When responding to an email last night I made the statement, “Anthropologists and our discipline are traditionally misunderstood, which is ironic in that it is our jobs to make others easier to understand.” Followed a few sentence later by, “I identify myself as an anthropologist above all else.”

After I sent my email I then pondered on those two statements. It is very true that our discipline is misunderstood. I have often had to differentiate what I do from what an archeologist does. I have also had to explain that while yes our discipline previously studied far off groups of people in newly discovered areas of the world, that is not what the majority of us do today. That said, I do have to mention that when I specify that I am a “cyber anthropologist” (aka digital anthropologist, technical anthropologist etc) people do tend to perk up and lean in to learn more about what I do.

So here I thought would be the perfect place to really describe what it is I do as an anthropologist, why it’s important, and why I – though I am also a User Experience Designer and am working toward my PhD in Information Science – identify myself as an anthropologist above all else.

What do I, as an anthropologist, do?
So – I’ll preface this with this is what I do as an anthropologist and does not necessarily reflect what everyone else in the discipline does.

The simple answer is I study culture online and online culture.

Well, what does that mean?

Studying Culture Online: I study the way different people from different parts of the world use the Internet and how just having access to it can influence cultures and communities. Examples of this include China’s firewall, South Korea’s Starcraft fans, and how civil unrest across the world unfolds in social media.

Studying Online Culture: To keep it short, I study the way people interact online including their behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs. Additionally, I analyze their artifacts for trends, memes, and emerging understanding of how the Internet affects people’s lives and how people’s lives affect the Internet. Lastly, I have specified my focus on gamers and developers. However, while those are currently my preferred groups to study, I do branch out into politics, brands, and education.

Why is what I do important?
By understanding those around us we can learn from them and apply the lessons they’ve already overcome to other groups and situations that can benefit from them.

For example:
By understanding how gamers organically develop communities of practice and use open source tools to assist in communicating over geographically dispersed areas in order to successfully support their self-created and self-organized groups both in and out of in-game encounters, we can help businesses learn how to improve their communication techniques for their geographically dispersed teams in our ever increasingly global society. (You can read more about this here.)

Another example from my own work includes:
Understanding the motivation for participation in open source development communities and using that understanding to help motivate others to participate in more volunteer opportunities within their own communities.

While I could go on and on, I think these two examples help illustrate my particular research focus and how it can actually be applied to several different contexts that go far above and beyond the original groups and situations studied to help our economies and communities be more successful.

Why I identify as an anthropologist above all else?
I like to help people.

Yep, it’s as simple as that. In fact, it is that one idea that affects my entire approach to life including my other career and educational choices. This is why I identify as an anthropologist above all of the other identities I have. It completely influences absolutely everything else I do.

As a user experience designer I strive to help the people using the applications I design, the developers developing these applications, and the companies for which these applications are implemented. Yes, what I do goes that far and affects all of those groups. Being an anthropologist helps provided me with this holistic perspective as well as an ability to understand all of these groups in order to find ways to help them in the best way possible. I could not do my job if I didn’t think it was helping others and I have in fact left other jobs because I did not feel that the work I was doing had a positive enough effect on those it touched.

As a PhD student in information science I strive to find ways to make information easier to access, understand, and share. In the end, it’s not about the information itself, but those who use it and how it and the ways it can be used can better the lives of those users. My specific focus within my course of study is human computer interaction. It is the human part of that, that makes all of the difference.

Final Thoughts
So there you go! This is really just a very small glimpse into what I do and why I do it. I am posting it here in hopes of making my discipline a little easier to understand. My intent was to also how the work I do, though it may seem somewhat inconsequential as it focuses on things like gaming, actually can be applied to groups and situations that can have a far reaching impact on our communities and economies.

I love what I do and I am thankful every day that I have an opportunity to do it.

I recently read remarks you made about my discipline, anthropology. There you proclaimed that your state, Florida, didn’t need any more anthropologists.

“Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so.”

It saddens me that you are ignorant of the fact that your state is the home of one of the best anthropology programs out there. That said, I think you should really do that thing we anthropologists call “research” before you make statements that you’re not prepared to defend.

Here, some University of South Florida students have given you a head start:.

Lastly, I would like to state for the record that I am an anthropologist. I not only have a job, but a very good paying job. Additionally, I do research in everything from Open Source Software development to User Experience Design. I have conducted research for companies such as Microsoft, Motorola, General Motors, Red Hat, and am currently working on research for yet another tech company. Last I checked these all represent aspects of technology, one of those subjects that seems to be tremendously valued by you. Please learn more about my discipline before saying it’s useless.

For those interested in the community report on my research can be found here.

If you have questions, or just want to chat please feel free to email me (diana [@] cyber-anthro.com), comment here, or find me on IRC. I’ll also be at the conference through Monday and look forward to chatting and collaborating with you if you’re here!